Ordinary diners who take part in our annual survey each spring review restaurants and leave their feedback, but we also ask them to score restaurants from 1-5 on food, service and ambience. Harden’s then uses an average of these scores and measures them against other establishments in the same price bracket to arrive at the ratings published in the guide and online.

Snippets from some of your feedback may end up in the overall Harden’s review, noticeably they appear in “double quotation marks”. The rest of our pithy, bite-sized restaurant summaries are compiled by analysing the survey data and extracting recurring themes, looking at whether or not a venue was nominated in any of our categories – like ‘favourite’ or ‘most overpriced’ – and, of course, looking at the ratings for food, service and ambience.

The Harden’s ratings indicate that a restaurant is:

exceptional very good good average poor

All reviews are compiled from survey comments and ratings, without any regard for our own personal opinions, except in cases where restaurants are too new to have been included in the survey. If you want the editors’ view on new restaurants in London you can find them in our Editors’ Review section.

News

Italian star for Battersea Power Station

Fresh from the launch of Radici in Islington, Italian chef Francesco Mazzei has announced plans to open a third restaurant in the new Battersea Power Station development this summer.

Fiume – Italian for river, in reference to the Thames-side location – will serve Italian classics under the day-to-day running of head chef Francesco Chiarelli, Mazzei’s fellow-Calabrian. There will be an open kitchen with a wood-fired oven, and a 50-seater outdoor terrace to take advantage of the setting in good weather.

Radici opened last month to glowing reviews, and was Mazzei’s second venue as chef-patron under the D&D restaurant group umbrella following his appointment to head Sartoria on Savile Row in Mayfair in 2015.

Fiume will be in Circus West Village, the first phase of the Malaysian-owned former power station’s £9 billion redevelopment to be completed. The line-up also includes a Wright Brothers seafood restaurant, Ben’s Canteen, Duckroad, a branch of the Copenhagen pizzeria Mother and Dodd’s Gin, as well as the Village Hall fringe theatre and events venue.